


Current Corpse

by Anonymous



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, depersonalization/derealization, patrick is nice to him in this one, victor is a strange one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:46:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25803091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The first time it happens, they're in math class. Then the school bathroom. Then Patrick's bedroom. Or, The one where Victor tries his best to be real.
Relationships: Victor Criss/Patrick Hockstetter
Kudos: 30
Collections: Anonymous





	1. Chapter 1

The first time it happens, they’re in math class. Victor Criss is sitting near the back of the room, close to the window, looking out at the dying autumn trees while halfheartedly listening to the lesson. That’s when Patrick, who’s sitting beside him, swats at his bicep with a clear plastic ruler and, despite the thick fabric of his sweater cushioning the blow, Victor flinches and puts a hand over the slightly sore spot before glaring at his lanky friend.

This does nothing to deter Patrick Hockstetter.

“Hey, Vic, look,” Patrick whispers to him, grins wide as he unzips his black pencil case.

He’s done the same thing before, so Victor immediately turns his head the other way. Last time, he dumped the contents out on the desk in front of him and the blond gagged loudly at the sight.

“Fuck off,” Vic hisses back, sparing him a quick and cautious glance, “I already know what’s in there, you fuckin’ psycho.”

“ _Mister Criss!_ ” their professor says, drawing Victor’s attention to the front of the classroom. The loud sound of the woman hitting the big ring on her middle finger against her wooden desk once, twice, three times, echoes in the room. “And Mr Hockstetter, _out_ ,” she says, and she waves at the door. Victor just sighs at this, doesn’t care enough about the lecture to protest, and gathers all his things before walking towards the door.

Behind him, he can feel Patrick looming, waiting for him to open the door, and then, when they’re outside of the room, he hears him close it behind them. He walks too close to him, drags his feet as he follows him outside of the building through the back entrence. And when Victor leans against the wall, Patrick stands right in his face and grins again.

“Nice job getting us kicked out,” Patrick says, sounding smug, as if he’s looking for the right nerve to prod at.

“Oh, suck my dick, that was your fault,” Vic scoffs, pushing his hair out of his face.

“Sure thing, faggot.”

Victor doesn’t retort, just sticks up his middle finger as he sifts through his jacket pocket with his other hand, looking for his cigarettes. Patrick is still there, in his space, and he reaches out a bony hand to grab a cigarette from Victor’s pack.

“Fuck off, get your own,” the blonde says, pulling the pack away, though not before letting their hands linger there for a second. Their fingertips brushing against each other feels, to him, much more significant than it probably is.

* * *

The next time it happens, they’re at school again, skipping class, and it’s just the two of them. Patrick opens his jacket wide and pulls out a ziploc bag, and Victor doesn’t need to look too hard to figure out what it is. Still, he stares at the boy in front of him, quirking an eyebrow.

“Let’s roll this shit,” Patrick urges, though he’s already grabbing him by the arm and tugging him towards the bathroom. The school is half empty that day, just a couple of days before summer vacation, and their footsteps echo in the empty hall.

The tiles on the bathroom floor are wet, and the windows are wide open. There’s no one there, yet Patrick is quick to push Victor into the last stall, the one closest to the windows.

“There’s no one here, what’s the point?” Victor asks.

“Someone might come.”

Victor doesn’t buy it. Patrick locks the door behind them.

They roll three joints with the weed that Patrick has on him and put them in the baggy before Patrick stuffs it into his jacket again. Then, when Victor reaches for the door, considering the deed to be done and feeling quite ready to get out of the dingy bathroom, Patrick grabs his arm. It becomes clear to him in that moment how close they’re standing, just how much taller his friend his, the tight grip he has on him. He contemplates trying to tear his arm away, but he can’t get himself to move. And Patrick has that same fucking grin on his face again.

“You sucked Gage’s dick in here right?” and he leans into Vic’s space again, makes himself even taller, “in this stall?”

Victor frowns and stares at the tiles, face growing hot and eyes feeling wet with embarrassment. Still, he composes himself. He thinks for a second about how warm it feels between the two of them, and his stomach ties itself in knots. The entire encounter feels like it’s happening in slow motion, like the whole world has died and it’s just the two of them floating alone somewhere. It’s unnerving.

“Yeah, like a year ago,” is all he says, then gathers enough resolve to pull himself out of Patrick’s grip, “can we go now?”

When he looks up at Patrick’s face, the boy seems focused, like he’s contemplating something, and then his demeanor becomes calm again and he gives a small satisfied nod and cracks the stall door open. Fucking freak.

That evening, Victor lies in his bed, stares up at the ceiling and lets his body sink into the mattress. He’s had this _thing_ for a while now, this strange thought that he couldn’t shake. It felt, to Victor Criss, that he was dead. Or nonexistant. Or simply in a state of not being, in some weird limbo. He knows he can move his body, knows there’s blood in him and that he breathes air, yet it feels as though he’s just _convinced_ himself that he’s real, without actually being real. He chain smokes in his bedroom with his window open until he hears his mother slam her fist against his bedroom door and yell at him to get to bed. Then he smokes in his bedroom with the lights off. The night goes by, then the next day, then the next week, until Friday. Friday after school.


	2. Chapter 2

This is nothing new. Victor has been to Patrick’s house plenty of times before, more often than Patrick had been to his, partially due to how close to the school Patrick lived, partially (though he would never say this) because Victor felt much more comfortable in Patrick’s room than his. Victor Criss’ home life was something of an open secret in their little quartet. Like Henry’s dad, or Belch’s lack of one. They’ve all seen Victor’s mother at parent teacher nights, heard her shrill voice on the phone when she’d call her son demanding he get home if he stayed out too late, but their relationship was never something that was discussed. Still, Patrick knew his best shot at getting the boy alone was to invite him over.

Victor had been to Patrick’s house plenty of times. He hasn’t been there, however, since their little tryst by the junkyard, where, half-high and half-drunk off of vodka poured into a bottle of oj, Victor half-whispered a poorly thought confession of his attraction to his taller friend.

They were sitting on the ground, backs against an old wrecked car, closer than normal, getting high on their own after Henry and Belch had left. When the words processed in his mind, Patrick sputtered around the joint he was taking a drag from, coughed, face going crimson (because Victor made him _fucking choke_ , he would say). He started wiping his face, eyes filling with tears, before limply offering the j to Victor and doing his best to compose himself.

“Yeah, I--,” Patrick began, though his raw throat cut him off and he stopped to clear it, gaze pointing down at the concrete, “I like you too, Vic,” and he sounded entirely nonchalant. Looking to his side, he noticed Victor’s brows furrow. He stared at him for a moment, trying to discern his expression, but tensed when he noticed Victor’s glassy blue eyes move to look back at him.

They sat there for a moment, Victor’s palm growing sweaty around the plastic bottle of orange juice and vodka, until he gathered the courage to stub out the butt of the joint on the pavement and place his other hand over Patrick’s, which was resting on his bony knee. A strained conversation ensued, made even more difficult by Patrick making no attempt to articulate his desires, and Victor’s flustered tapping of his fingers against the lid of the bottle.

“So are you my boyfriend now?” Victor asked.

“Do you want me to be?” Patrick responded.

Victor simply nodded, though he isn’t sure that Patrick saw him.

They sat there for a while longer, until it got too cold, and when it was time to go home, they hugged for the first time before parting ways. Patrick’s tall frame and large unbuttoned jacket nearly enveloped Victor, making him feel incredibly small. He thinks maybe they could sink into each other. He thinks that’s kinda gay.

Now, nearly a week of late night calls and secret hand holding later, Victor is standing outside the Hockstetter family home, feet planted firmly on the welcome mat, finger hovering in front of the doorbell tentatively. Any alone time between them feels significant to Victor, especially in a situation where they’re _truly_ alone. Patrick’s parents are both away on a seminar in Concord for the weekend. He thinks of how, perhaps, moments from now, he’ll be able to hold Patrick’s hand again, entwine his fingers with Patrick’s own spindly ones for as long as he wants. So he presses his index finger to the doorbell, holds it for a moment and then straightens his posture and fixes his hair.

The old wooden door with green paint already chipping off its edges creaks open and Patrick’s head, all dark circles and unwashed hair in his face, pokes out. Once he sees him, he practically drags Victor inside and up the stairs to his bedroom, long legs skipping every other step. He guides the blonde to his bedroom, then closes the door behind them. It smells of stale smoke, Victor notices, like it always does, and he looks at the two shut windows. As uncomfortable as the smell is, it awakens an itch inside the boy, and he reaches into his jacket pocket to pull out a pack of Marlboro whites as he watches Patrick attempt to clear his desk and bed of laundry and coffee cups. He shrugs his jacket off and rests it on the back of Patrick’s desk chair before taking his shoes off and going to sit down cross-legged on the bed. Patrick sits on the chair, fiddles with his own pack of reds, tapping the back a few times before pulling a smoke out and grabbing a lighter off his desk. Then he watches, practically leers, as Victor places his cigarette between his teeth. He licks his lips at the sight, flicks the lighter and leans over to hold the burning flame to the tip of Victor’s smoke.

Victor’s face looks serious as he stares down at the cig and takes a couple of tiny puffs, breathes them out through his nose, light grey smoke pooling over his face and lazily up towards the ceiling.

Then he notices Patrick’s put his own cigarette in his mouth. Feeling brave, he leans right into the other boy’s personal space and presses the tips of their smokes together, lighting Patrick up. How intimate, he thinks, to poison each other so haphazardly. Patrick’s thick dark brows raise in amusement and he grins, placing a hand on Victor’s knee and, _god,_ he’s so much bigger than him.

Victor’s cigarette is between his fingers now, and Patrick looks at his small hands for a second before ashing his own smoke on the floor carelessly and leaning even closer, eclipsing the boy with his shadow. He tilts his head slightly, and Victor sits, unsure of what to do and so overwhelmed with the impulse to just do something that he grabs the hem of Patrick’s shirt to pull him closer, to keep him there.

“You ever kissed someone before, Vic?” and wow, he’s never heard Patrick speak that low. It almost makes him shiver. Instead, he just shakes his head.

“No.”

Patrick’s eyebrows jump up and he looks genuinely dumbfounded for a second before breaking out in a laugh that pushes him backwards into his chair. Now Victor’s really frowning, face feeling hot, stomach feeling sick.

“What?” he hisses, visibly annoyed.

Patrick gives that loud satisfied sigh that he gives when someone’s given him a good laugh, and this makes Victor feel even worse. He curls into himself a little, like he wants to get away. Once he notices that he’s actually upset the boy, Patrick’s expression softens.

“Nothing, it’s just,” he rubs his knee in an attempt to comfort him because that seems like it would help, and Vic’s stiff posture seems to relax a bit at the gesture, “you’ve sucked cock but you’ve never kissed anyone.”

When he puts it like that, it does sound absurd. Victor wonders, for a second, if he’s supposed to try to explain himself, try to offer an excuse for his bathroom stall rendez-vous from last summer (though, if there is a possible excuse, he can’t think of it). His pale blue eyes seem to scan Patrick’s face curiously.

“Have you?” Victor asks, looking a bit incredulous.

“Sucked dick or kissed someone?”

“Kissed someone, asshole,” he says, rolling his eyes. And Patrick grins at him again.

“Yeah,” he responds, “yeah I’ve kissed a couple of someone’s.”

No amount of inexperience, though, can prevent Victor from figuring out the trajectory that this conversation is taking them in. Still he feels his heartbeat accelerate and finds himself tickled by how they seem to be inching closer to one another, like this strange magnetism that puts them at the center.

“Can you kiss me?” the question seems to come out on its own, and Victor practically whispers it. Patrick doesn’t respond, just grounds him with that hand on his knee and brings them together.

When the older boy’s lips press against his, he melts. That’s different, he thinks. It feels softer than anything he could imagine the older boy to be capable of, intimate and light. And Patrick _is_ kissing him especially softly, craning his neck down towards the body beneath him and coaxing his mouth open gently. Patrick’s other hand, the one holding the cigarette, darts up to cup his cheek, the lit end pointing away from them, but still just close enough for Victor to feel his skin erupt in goosebumps at the possibility of a mishap.

They take brief breaks in between gentle kisses to smoke, and Patrick gets the wonderful idea to exhale the smoke from a particularly big drag into Victor’s mouth. When he does, he watches the boy’s pink cupid bow lips part to accept him, and he doesn’t quite kiss him, simply breathes right into him. Victor gives a small cough, an impressive amount of smoke floating out from between his lips. Once their smokes are gone, Patrick puts them out and tosses the butts into an empty cup on his desk.

Then, he leans forward again, his hands planted on the bed in front of him, and then his knees, and the mattress dips at their shared weight as he looms over the fawn boy beneath him.


	3. Chapter 3

Anxiety bubbles up inside Victor, makes him float out of his body and look down at himself. Still, he feels himself come back every time Patrick gives his bony leg a squeeze, or every time he feels Patrick’s breath ghost against his face. He’s sure he looks fucking terrified, he’s sure Patrick can see it. And he can. So he slows down, plants both hands on Victor’s knees and holds him there.

“Relax, Vicky,” he says, voice low and deliberate, trying to calm him, “I’m not going to do anything,” and Victor pretends he can’t feel the self-serving aura permeate off of Patrick as he speaks, “I just wanna kiss you.”

Then, Patrick reaches a hand up, touches it to Victor’s jaw, and moves it so that the blond tips his head back and to the side. Victor looks at the corner of his friend’s ceiling and lets out a nervous sigh. Patrick leans in again and presses his lips against the boy’s neck in an open mouthed kiss. He swipes his tongue along the skin there and then comes back up. His eyes scan Vic, inspect him, and then he grabs Vic’s shirt collar and tugs it to the side, leans down again and kisses the juncture between his neck and shoulder before gently pressing his teeth down into the soft skin. Every muscle in Victor’s body tenses up, and he grabs at Patrick’s arm as he gives out a quiet gasp. Patrick just stays put, bites him for a while longer before soothing the skin with gentle kisses. He does this again, slightly lower, stretching the fabric of Victor’s shirt a bit more.

Once he’s done, he comes back up again. His dark, unwashed hair is in his face, and his lips are swollen from all the kissing and biting. It makes Victor hungry, so he wraps an arm around Patrick’s neck and pulls him down into another, slightly lazier kiss.

They lie around and watch grainy TV, listen to music and touch each other until Victor’s curfew. Much to Patrick’s disappointment, just when he’s gotten his boy used to a hand roaming around under his shirt, Vic bolts up and looks at his wrist watch.

“I gotta go,” he says. The disappointment in his voice is cute, Patrick decides, and so he gets his hand out from rubbing Vic’s back gently and allows the boy to get up and try to make himself presentable. He slips his shoes on and grabs his jacket, gives Patrick a parting peck before darting towards the door. As Vic makes his way down to the front door, Patrick just falls back onto his bed, not bothered enough to go lock the door after his companion leaves.

It’s already dark outside, and the cold air hits Vic, making his arms erupt in gooseflesh as he slides his jacket on and digs his hands into his pockets. He tries not to care about the hell his ma will give him, lets his mind stay in Patrick’s bedroom instead. Or maybe he lets his thoughts drift even more, to somewhere far away. The pavement is wet like it had been raining, and the smell of petrichor is a comfort. He digs his keys out from his pocket as he approaches his driveway, noting the light is on in his room. Probably mom digging through his things again.

“Victor, is that you?” Marcia Criss’ voice toes the line perfectly between shrill and nasally, and she always addresses her son like she’s accusing him of something. Vic hums in agreement, and there she is, leaning against the living room archway with her evening glass of wine, “it’s past your curfew.”

“Sorry, ma,” is all Victor musters in response, mentally checked out of the conversation already. She berates him some more about his choice in friends, talks about some rumor she heard about the Huggins boy’s dad doing time. Then, she takes a sip of her wine, raises her eyebrows and looks at him.

“And look at you, incredulous, just like your fucking _daddy_.”

Victor doesn’t say anything at that. There’s no point in engaging when he knows he won’t win. So he hangs his jacket up and walks towards the stairs.

“I’m going to my room,” is the last thing he tells her, voice trailing off as he walks up the steps and into reprieve, closing the door behind him with a gentle kick. Then, he gets out of his clothes, dons an old white T-shirt and lies down in his bed to stare at the ceiling. Maybe he’lll chain smoke for a bit, or maybe even try to do his English assignment for Monday. Or maybe he’ll just lie there and float.

Victor Criss often thinks about killing himself. Not as an escape or an act of desperation, just as an experience. It would be better, he thinks, to choose to die than to be forced to. It would be nice, he thinks, to know when his time is up, or even to have a say in it. He knows himself, though, knows that he’d chicken out. Maybe he’d be able to get someone else to do it for him, once he’s old, and ugly, and sad. Life seems like one long dream that never ends.

The next time they see each other, it’s in the trans-am. Patrick and Victor are cramped up in the back seat while Henry sits shotgun and Belch Huggins drives. Patrick’s long bony legs are splayed out, knees apart, and he looks like some sort of gangly spider creature. He almost seems smug about how much space he’s taking up. Victor shoves him a bit to get some breathing room, but it doesn’t work, only earning him a sleazy grin. And so he rolls his eyes, leans back and lights a cigarette.

Belch is messing with the radio with one hand while he has his other on the wheel. It’d be easier to just let Henry do it, but Huggins doesn’t like people fucking with any part of his car, even if it’s just changing radio stations. He lands on some old garage band with light static and turns it up so that, from where Vic is sitting, it almost overpowers Henry’s voice. It’s cold enough that the top is up, so Victor rolls down a window to flick his ash out.

Henry’s giving an impassioned speech about what a joy it would be to curb stomp Bill Denborough, but Victor is just barely listening, more focused on the fact that Patrick Hockstetter is inching closer and closer to him and resting a bony hand on his knee. The gesture would be annoying if it wasn’t so grounding, yet in that moment the space inside the trans-am feels dreamlike, and Victor feels like the fingers digging into his leg are the only things tethering him to the world around him and making it real. He blinks hard like he would if he was trying to wake himself up from a nightmare.

When he turns to face Patrick, their faces are way too close together to be casual, and he’s got this look of intrigue, like Victor just said something incredibly fascinating. He’s staring right at Victor, and that dreamlike stupor makes him want to freeze, but he realizes quickly that their friends are _right there._ So, instead, he shoves Patrick away like he normally would, hissing out a “fuck off” and continuing to smoke. It’s all show, and Patrick knows it. But they both know how perceptive Henry is, how quick he is to notice when something is off. If Victor were to think harder about it, it probably has something to do with his upbringing, but he doesn’t particularly want to think about that. Patrick lets out a short and mocking laugh before leaning back a bit, finally giving Victor some space. Those eyes are still on him, like they always are. Patrick’s stare is predatory in a way that makes him feel filthy.

Smoke pools around Victor, making his eyes fill with tears. He wipes his face with the back of his hand. He fucking hates Derry because it poisons everyone in it, and he hates it even more, he thinks, because nobody ever gets out.


End file.
